[center][u][b]Cordelia Lynn Holmes[/b][/u][/center] Lynn chewed again on Amelia's words. [i]Everybody's got something lucky they hold onto, right?[/i] Lynn had never felt particularly blessed with good luck - the sole stroke of blessed fortune was getting the single public defender in the continental United States that cared about parahumans assigned to her case, but Lynn had never attributed much to luck. [i]I'd trade luck to be tall enough to ride the rollercoasters, honestly.[/i] Besides, there'd been little in Lynn's life she felt like she'd ever held onto for very long. Her hoodie, maybe, one of the few possession that made it through parahuman juvy, but even then, she never felt like it was much in the way of luck. Lynn listened closely to what she said about cults. Sororities? Lynn had really never heard much about them. She knew they were like societies or something, from Italy, maybe? And they were all slutty, but that was about all the intel she had. Lynn considered attending college and becoming President of the United States as equally likely for her, so she'd never looked much into it. Still, that didn't stop her from forming an opinion. "Well, we should get one started here," Lynn said, in the sort of blank affect tone that was never clear if it was joking or serious, even to herself. "At least we'd be making some money off the brainwashing." Denim and Denzel came over, and Lynn felt a brief flutter of mercy that he and Natalie weren't anywhere around. [i]Maybe there's some luck after all. Wonder if there's any gambling here.[/i] Lynn had been interested in the boxing leagues the Promise had, but they were banned to elemental parahumans. It'd hadn't stopped her from watching as many matches as she could, and offering to spar with any of them behind closed doors. A few had taken her up on it, and it'd been a nice shake-up from hitting a heavy bag. The more violently-minded ones were won over by Lynn's offer they could literally hit her as hard as they wanted and she'd be fine the next morning. [i]Who said I don't know how to win men over, huh?[/i] Keaton and Eli walked up and Lynn's brain jumped between a few thoughts, all of them the sort that felt like the moment right before you take the plunge. What had they been talking about? Why were they coming over? Why were they hanging out for so long? Why - Lynn blinked, and felt her pocket for her phone. It was turned off - and also back in her dorm. Lynn had been forgetting things lately. The one day she made it to class the previous week, she'd forgotten her bag. "I...shit, my bad," Lynn said, blinking. She turned to Keaton as she answered her question, keeping her voice steady but hoping to say more with her now-orange eyes. "Oh, you know. Who knows what kinds of interesting things you might turn up here," she said. [i]Keaton and I need to meet again soon. I have to tell her about the loading docks.[/i] Eli had asked more or less the same thing, and Lynn greeted her - to her own surprise, with a smile. "What's up," she said. Lynn looked around the crowded room and saw Eli meet Freaky D's gaze. Lynn felt her jaw tense. The last time he'd been present when kids got brought in, she'd wound up far closer to death than she'd admit. [i]If he comes here, there could be problems. Christ, why don't he and Cara just fuck already and stop causing problems for the rest of us.[/i] Lynn looked down at her cafeteria tray, freshly devoured. She was still hungry. "You think there's time to - " The doors opened and Lynn's eyes widened. Her heart jumped and her mind flashed from here to a dozen different places, the sounds of gunshots blasting out glass and windows. There were few things that Lynn was more qualified at than the other students her age. She was not as gentle as Archie. She was not as profound as Natalie, as sharp as Keaton, forgiving as Eli, artistic as Amelia, or have good watches like Fossil or whatever his nickname had been. She couldn't even flop as good as Fish. But Lynn, for better or worse, was perhaps the single most qualified person to handle a drive-by. "Get the - " Lynn started to shout, but she was too slow. She'd always been too slow. The machine guns thundered and Amelia's neck exploded beside her, splattering Lynn with blood she did not register she felt across her face. Lynn was already dropping her tray, already - [i]The blow connected with Lynn's head and she crumpled to the floor, the world spinning. Lynn spat out a tooth. It would grow back in two weeks or so. She looked up. Che shook his right hand, grimacing. The knuckles were red. "You burned me." "I'm sorry," Lynn said, automatically - you said I'm sorry whenever you could, because you never knew when you did something wrong, and you wanted to get ahead of it and make sure Che didn't get mad. But this time Che wasn't mad. He was teaching her to be tough. She had to be tough. "Come here," he said, pulling her back inside the house. Calling it a house was charitable - a few of Che's business partners this week owned it, and nearly everything was in a state of disarray. The TV alone functioned flawlessly, and he sat Lynn down before it. Her backpack with her grade school homework sat forgotten leaning against the couch that had been baptized in cigarette smoke a thousand times over. Che put something on TV. An old fight. Some of Lynn's favorites - though she didn't recognize the fighter. "His name was Smokin' Joe." He looked down at Lynn, who grinned, a trickle of blood oozing out. "Like me." Che nodded, giving her the quarter-smile. She only once or twice got a half-smile - when she'd done a really important job for him and when she'd (for a moment, Lynn thought about the bottle, breaking in her hand, and her face, but then it was gone) - but she got the quarter-smiles every now and then. "Like you. You know what Smokin' Joe did? He never took a step back. Not a single fuckin' one. Always forward. He could take it." "I can take it too." "Good," Che said. On the chair beside them, a man in a drug-induced stupor drooled listlessly and stared at the screen, unaware entirely they'd changed it, but to Lynn, she may as well have been in a palace, kneeling before the monarch who was knighting her. "Because when you're a little older, I'll need you to. You have to rush in and keep us safe. Because you can take the hits. The others can't, they - "[/i] Lynn was moving forward when suddenly she wasn't. Lynn was on the floor. Had she tripped? She blinked, looking around. She had been shot before, but not like this. Something was wrong. The center of her chest was a bloody mess, which irritated her more than it did frighten her, and her legs refused to work. Lynn didn't hurt as much as she thought she should, which was to be expected. Just felt like getting punched, real hard, at least until everything started falling out. Lynn grunted and went to pull herself up. She couldn't. The smell of the cafeteria floor being scorched as she cauterized her wounds filled the air along with the smell of gunpowder and blood and the smell of panic, of a hundred people ruining themselves as their bodies shut down and the rest sweating and shaking. Lynn blinked. "No," she murmured. "No, fuck, fuck, no, damnit, get up!" she tried to push herself up again and nothing happened. She felt down and grabbed at her leg. She felt nothing. She ran her hand over the wound and around to her back. Christ. In the spine. Lynn leaned back down, trying to present as small a profile as possible - which, mercifully, was not difficult for her. She was going to die as a cripple. Weak. Broken. [i]Amelia. Amelia can get me closer.[/i] Lynn dragged herself a foot or two closer and looked at the girl in front of her. Lynn's mind had been racing so fast she forgot the girl was shot. She was already pretty pale but she was getting pale a lot faster, and all the hair on the right side of her head was matted thick with blood. Lynn looked up at her for assent, grimaced, and uttered a quick, "Sorry." She didn't know, in that brief moment, if she was apologizing that it was going to hurt, or if that she was going to look like Lynn after. With the sound of bullets tearing through the air a foot and a half over her head, that thought occurred to Lynn. [i]You're gonna be ugly now, you poor bitch.[/i] Then Lynn grabbed a hand over as much of the wound as she could and grunted. There was the smell of flesh being flash-scorched and the exit wound sealing off as she cauterized as much as she dared. Lynn thought she'd gotten the most of it, and uttered another - rare, genuine - apology as she rolled back over. everything below the sternum was numb. She couldn't crawl closer, she thought, her mind racing. If she did, she'd get gunned down before she ever get close. How many of them were there? Lynn couldn't see particularly well over a corpse next to her, a girl that looked barely older than her. Lynn shut it out of her mind. She'd seen people who started noticing things like the necklace of the state of Montana around her neck or the t-shirt with a witty caption that was riddled with bullet holes on her. If you noticed stuff like that instead of how many of them there were, or what they were packing, you got killed too. Lynn could see one about thirty feet away. Even if Amelia had been hidden, she thought, Lynn didn't think she could teleport both of them over. She looked back over at them, desperation gnawing at her. [i]Fucking do something,[/i] she wanted to scream. [i]You're going to die on the floor like a crippled fucking coward?[/i] Lynn twisted her neck back around the other way with utter disregard for the state of spine. She could see the others, it looked like Eli had been winged, but - - Archie. [i]When did he - [/i] Lynn saw him on the ground, bleeding. If he wasn't turning, then it must be bad, it must be as bad as Amelia's or even worse. She hesitated. She could pull herself over, she could cauterize him. Lynn didn't even know if him turning would be bad. If they were all going to die, at least these machine gun fuckers - [i]Gennedy, if I live, I will burn you worse than you'll burn in hell [/i] she thought, amidst it all, furious, furious that nothing had ever worked for her, that she was going to die on the loading bay floors a hundred yards from a box with the proof she needed to find them - at least they might die too. The guns behind her kept thundering, and Lynn felt her stomach turn cold and sick. How many people were they shooting? Archie was only one. Fifteen or twenty feet back from her. Lynn turned back. [i]Che would've left him to die, too,[/i] a little voice told her. [i]And me,[/i] a South African voice whispered. [i]And maybe when it's done you can still have your way with him before - [/i] Lynn twisted onto her side, grunting from the exertion. Christ, this was bad. She took a breath or two for a moment, trying to steady herself. She pushed how awful she felt - [i]Archie, bleeding on the floor, staring right at you [/i] - not away, but down onto the embers, and she stoked the coals. She could feel herself getting hotter. Wouldn't matter. Lynn reckoned her lifespan was in seconds, and if she withered here at least she'd melt a few - [i]four people vaporized[/i] - with her. She stared, looking for anything she could use. They were getting smoked - Lynn grinned, pain shooting through her as she reached into her pocket. She had to try and balance herself with what few muscles remained functional to her as she drew out her pack of cigarettes, trembling in her hands. [i]You pussy,[/i] she thought. [i]Stop acting like you're losing your gunshot virginity and do something.[/i] Lynn opened up the packet, pulling out one cigarette. She gripped it for a moment, taking a deep breath. It flickered alight, and she tucked it down in the pack. Timing. Timing was everything. She waited one moment, two - The cigarettes were half-lit now, and the fire was spreading. Lynn hurled it as best she could at the nearest gunman. She'd never taken into account how much your back and core were needed for a good throw, and it landed a few feet off the mark - but it was close enough. The gunman stopped, turning to look at it for just a bare moment. Maybe he thought it was a grenade, or some kind of trick. [i]Little of both.[/i] Lynn tried to block everything out - the throbbing pain in her core, the screams all around her, him curled up on the floor in his own blood, Eli's leg, Amelia's neck - and focus on the pack of cigarettes. She watched the flame blossom up more and more, devouring the pack through the cardboard. Lynn took a deep breath and felt it flicker closer to her, as if it was pulling and yearning to be back to its master. Lynn could almost feel its heat, she thought. Lynn turned her focus to the machinegun in the man's gloved hands, the barrel already hot from the half-a-hundred rounds he'd rattled through it. [i]"Holy shit!" He muttered, twisting his .45 to examine it. The barrel was red hot, and it had kicked twice as hard as it usually did. Che rubbed at his wrist and looked at it, smoke rolling off the muzzle. "Is that bad?" "No," Che murmured, thinking, and grinning - a half-grin - staring at the weapon in his hand. "It's good. It's very good. We - "[/i] Lynn saw as he kept firing, the barrel getting red hot. It was just water in a mug. She just had to boil the water. Not anybody else near her, not the bodies in front of her twitching and convulsing - not Montana Girl, who probably said smart ass things that would've annoyed Lynn, just the water in the mug. Lynn took another deep breath, pushing it all out. This was like round seven or eight. You were starting to get battered pretty bad but you weren't out yet. Lynn tried to feel the heat, tried to feel it with her own, as if she could set the whole world on fire with just a spark if she had to. The cigarette pack flared up beside the man, jumping to a foot and a half tall before it died back down, the cigarettes burned through. The strain of it was pulling at every inch of Lynn, as if each part of her body had tried to pull against itself, and she could feel her own flames flickering down as she pushed herself too hard. [i]Christ the only class I'm passing is power training, let me fucking do this.[/i] The man screamed in pain, hopping back. The tip of his barrel was white-hot, and some of the metal had dripped down onto his shoe, melting through. Lynn felt as though Spoons had picked up a freight train and beaten her with it. The edges of her vision were darkening and there was a dull thudding somewhere in her skull. Or chest. Both. She kept going. Once Lynn Frazier got smokin', after all, you couldn't stop her, and Eli and Lucy and Clarita were behind her. She bit down as hard as she could to keep from screaming and drawing any more attention than a girl on fire already would, and pushed the heat as much as she could - half her strength gone to fanning the thermal energy, the other to keeping it in the mug, to just the boiling water, to not letting the mug break. He desperately tried to lift the machine gun and take aim, but the barrel was warping. He pulled the trigger and nothing happened. He fumbled, trying to clear the chamber, and that set it off. The bullet in the chamber exploded prematurely, and its brothers and sisters in the ammo box followed suit. Each one seemed to hit Lynn with a punch in the gut from the force it took to wear down their points of combustion, to aggravate the heat and flame that made them burst open, and to make the steel of the gun melt quicker. The machine gun exploded in his hands, sending shrapnel back into his chest and arms, and making molten metal splatter up onto him. The man screamed in a language Lynn thought she vaguely recognized. [i]Fish?[/i] she thought for a moment, blearily. Everything was spinning. [i]You're joining me soon, bitch,[/i] she heard Salamandra giggle, wheezing as she leaned back against the wall. Was someone choking her? Lynn was having trouble catching her breath. The back of her neck felt bare, which didn't make sense, because she had hair there - and her skin felt cold, but there should've been clothes. Smoke clung to her, and the hand she was holding out to the gunman had fallen to the elbow, and then the wrist. No weight Lynn had ever lifted was so heavy as keeping her fingers off the ground, trying to strain her abilities, to hit this man with all the force she had, and more precision than she was capable of. [i]Chinese,[/i] Lynn thought. [i]Or, close the fuck enough, no one cares if a corpse is wrong.[/i] "Hey fucker," Lynn wheezed. "I can't see the Great Wall from up here after all, you know, you - " The man was screaming, reaching up with his mangled hands to his ski mask, which he was able to rip off with scalded fingers. Lynn hadn't been able to see before, but the molten metal had splashed to his face and was fusing the mask to his skin. [i]Fucking right,[/i] Lynn thought. [i]You're the sort of bastard who kills - [/i] He looked up at Lynn with wide, horrified eyes. He was screaming. He couldn't have been more than thirteen years old. He was screaming. He had gangly long arms that were longer than his legs, they hadn't growed evenly. He was screaming. His face where he was trying to grow in facial hair was burning, melting through, superheated metal or molten barrel, it didn't matter, he couldn't get it off, couldn't get it out. He was screaming. Lynn stared, suddenly colder than she had ever been in her whole life. "No. No, no, I didn't, I'm not, I didn't - " Lynn turned, where one of his comrades had seen what happened. She knew what happened next. She wanted to think of a lot of things, but none of them came to her. Lynn ground her teeth against one another and tried to push herself up, to die on her feet, but nothing was working. The comrade raised a rifle and fired off a burst. Only one hit. Only one needed to. [i]Keaton,[/i] Lynn thought, wildly. "The loading docks, the, they're, you have - " Lynn had been hit very hard in her life. She had taken punches from fully grown men, and had Natalie thrown into her by a full-powered Archie, and been beaten at the hands of Salamandra. She had been shot before this, by bigger bullets at closer range. She'd been beaten in prison, in the ring, and jumped on the street. Not a single blow to the head rocked her spine as much as that bullet did. If her skull had still been in tact, she might've snapped about how she'd been hit by a .45 round before, and it had hurt a hell of a lot worse. Instead her head snapped. It was slammed against the ground and went still. The world was running in front of her eyes, but half of it was dark. The floor was cool. Someone had spilled something. It felt wet. Warm. Lynn tried to move to get closer to the warm, because she was cold, she was very cold, but she couldn't move. Her legs weren't working. She didn't think any of her was working. Someone had spilled something. Her head hurt. Was she drunk? [i]I killed a kid,[/i] Lynn thought, but even her thoughts were slurring. Was she back in the woods? [i]I drank too much,[/i] Lynn thought. [i]I drank too much.[/i] This was a bad joke. Keaton or Eli or Che would come and fix this. [i]The restaurant, she's gonna get out of the restaurant and get him. She's gonna hurt him.[/i] But that didn't make sense. She had to cauterize him. There were lights, flickering, flickering. She couldn't see as good. There was something dripping in her left eye, she couldn't see so good out of it. There was no noise, though, and she thought they should be. No one was screaming any more. Lynn knew that was good. Lynn blinked. Or winked.